Cigar Connoisseur & Reviewer

Menu

Month: June 2016

While Cuba and the Dominican Republic might hog the spotlight when it comes to making the best cigars, but the Central American nation of Honduras has more than held their own when it comes to producing high quality cigars of note. While they have experienced a turbulent history, the blend of famed tobaccos that came from Cuba shortly after Castro’s revolution, mixed with the naturally fertile environments and many unique ecosystems of the Honduran countryside to create some of the best and most popular flavors in the world.

Roots From Cuba
Honduras has grown tobacco since they were a Spanish colony, and the many unique ecosystems found throughout the nation offered farmers some interesting possibilities. Although Honduras has always had the ability to produce fine cigars, a mass emigration of tobacco farmers (and their plants) from Cuba in the 1950s created even more opportunity for fine cigar blends that caught worldwide attention.

Uniquely Situated For Tobacco Growth
One of the strange things about Honduras is that there are many regions that are very unique. Some areas have volcanic soil, others are tropical, others are sub-tropical. With so many different soil types, the different flavors and fragrances of tobacco that could be grown have led to Honduran blends in particular being among some of the favorites world wide among blend cigar connoisseurs.

Famous Regions
While it’s hard to travel to any part of Honduras that doesn’t grow fine tobacco, there are a few regions in particular that are famous for the cigar tobacco they produce. The Copan region to the west are some of the oldest fields in the nation, producing since early colonial times.

The Danli in El Paraiso is one of the heavyweight areas for producing fine tobacco, and is arguably the tobacco capital of the nation – which is really saying something! The Jamastran Valley in the southern valleys of the nation might be the southern capital for tobacco production, and certainly put out some major names in cigars.

Plagues & Hurricanes
However, not everything has been peaches and cream in the cigar making history. 1985 saw a plague of blue mold that annihilated large portions of the tobacco crops throughout many regions and created damage on a level that took half a decade to bounce back from.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Hurricane Mitch slammed into the nation in 1998 and destroyed not only many of the crops, but the buildings, plants, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure were all destroyed, which played a part in the Dominican Republic becoming so widely known and dominant.

Recovery has taken time, but the tobacco was always too good for Honduras to not make a comeback in the modern cigar market.